Disaster Recovery Journal Spring 2026

DR Planning and Practices Leave Many Unprepared About 42% of survey respondents reported having a significant disaster, outage, or business disruption in the past two years. Additionally, fewer than 40% of respondents felt very or extremely pre pared to deal with a site failure or disaster (see Figure 6). Forrester found that: n Business impact analyses (BIAs), risk assessments, and DR plans need attention. Roughly 59% of respondents updated DR plans annually, with another 35% updating more frequently (see Figure 7). Risk assessments and BIAs followed similar update patterns. Fewer than 20% of respondents updated these three aspects of risk and recovery planning twice a year or more frequently. In a business climate defined by rapid technology change, long planning and update cycles increase the risk organizations are unprepared for disruptions involving new platforms, services, or emerging threats. n DR readiness dashboards remain poorly adopted. Despite increased operational resilience requirements and more tool availability, only 32% of respondents reported having a dashboard to indicate recovery readiness for their organization (see Figure 8). Without effective resilience reporting, identifying and prioritizing gaps in the DR

program becomes significantly more difficult, particularly as environments grow more distributed and complex. Businesses seeking enhanced DR capabilities should be testing DR plans and correlating service health metrics in real time to ensure SLAs for recovery can be met. Backup, risk management tooling, and resilience orchestration vendors have been adding readiness dashboards that report on infrastructure health, test network connections, and estimate recovery time objectives for named workloads according to the estimated time to execute a recovery plan.

12 DISASTER RECOVERY JOURNAL | SPRING 2026